In general, textile garments and articles of apparel have similarly shaped front and rear panels that are superposed and seamed together along selected margins to enclose body parts.
These seams are sewn very close to the edges of the superposed panels to achieve good appearance and comfort when the garment is everted to place seams inside.
Seams on textile fabrics are machine sewn with individual panels and/or accessory pieces being manually manipulated for sewing.
The substitution of adhesives for sewing to connect panels is generally not acceptable because wider seams would be required for strength and once the garment is everted, these wider bonded seams would be uncomfortable against the wearer's body, particularly along the shoulders and regions of the lower torso.
Another major disadvantage with bonded seams for apparel worn over the body was the lack of seam strength, it being noted that the adhesive in bonded seams would be subject to separation by tension forces rather than shear--not unlike pulling a piece of tape from a surface rather than trying to slide it off.
For apparel (accessories) worn outside the body and not subject to seam failure by stress, bonded adhesives could be used, as in the textile fabric necktie of Zimmerman U.S. Pat. No. 3,036,311.
Textile fabrics are made of natural or synthetic fiber strands that are interwoven to form web lengths of woven fabric.
Using wet or dry forming methods, `non-woven` fabrics are made of short length natural or synthetic fibers which are dispersed randomly in a continuous stream and bonded together with an agent to form a web of `non-woven` fabric.
Various combinations of fiber material, length, thickness and density of the dispersed fibers, type of bonding agent used, and other factors can be selected to result in different non-woven fabric characteristics.
Because non-wovens do not involve making strands before being woven, and because of much higher web formation production speeds for forming webs, non-wovens are significantly lower in cost.
In the 1960's, these new materials were adapted to disposable diapers as a pervious liner to allow passage of fluids to absorbent pads that were superposed on the impervious outer panel of the diaper.
During the late 1960's, different disposable products using non-wovens and plastics were described for hospital, medical, and special use products, including U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,221,341 of Hummel for bibs, 3,451, 062 of Bradley for a disposable examination gown, 3,663,962 of Burger for panties, and 3,719,955 of Hrubecky for a disposable garment having a rectangular torso section.
With low cost materials available, it was important to develop methods for producing garments with adhsively bonded seams along margins that are parallel to, perpendicular to, and at angles to, the direction of product flow.
This invention describes products made with methods and apparatus of U.S. Pat. No. 5,795,433 which describes methods to place a shaped first panel segment having discreet flap extensions on a carrier cylinder, placing a similarly shaped second segment without flaps on top of the first segment, applying adhesive along selected margins of the second segment, and folding the flaps over and around the borders of the second segment panel to create shaped garments during advancement of the superposed segment assembly along the carrier cylinder path.
The above described method is used to make seams on the garments illustrated and described in the specifications of this invention, it being understood that the seams thus produced have special advantages and attributes listed as objectives in the "Summary of the Invention" below.